Munson: Main Street Iowa coming back to life

Small towns restore historic downtowns with program's aid

Feb. 2, 2013

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Donovan Rypkema flew to Iowa last week from Washington, D.C., and delivered a belated holiday gift to the state’s historic preservationists and small-town boosters.

The economic development guru with PlaceEconomics spent recent months crunching 26 years’ worth of data on the Main Street Iowa program and reached a basic conclusion:

The effort has been a boon for Iowa taxpayers, leveraging an outsized influx of money and jobs into towns that put their shoulders to the wheel and restored their historic downtown commercial districts.

Maybe this strikes you as a rather rosy picture for our predominantly rural state with no shortage of shuttered shop fronts in many one-horse towns. Not to mention the nation has weathered three recessions since 1986.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack warned in December that rural America with its persistent depopulation is becoming politically “less relevant.”

More than a year ago in an occasional series, “Reinventing Rural Iowa,” I delved into the challenges as well as opportunities faced by Iowans in the hinterlands.

But Rypkema said to keep in mind that his study — which also includes the handful of urban downtowns in the program — reflects a dedicated, focused subset.

“It’s not random,” he said of the positive results. “There are these communities that say we’re going to do something about it.”

The basic goal of Main Street Iowa is to restore and reinvigorate the unique, historic features of downtowns. Iowa now has 49 cities actively involved, with the latest, Marion, added in January. No doubt this new study will be widely touted in the quest for future funding.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation as the umbrella organization helps to coordinate programs in at least 41 states plus Washington, D.C. When the concept emerged in the late ’70s there was concern over creeping homogenization, suburban sprawl and loss of history in small towns. But worry increasingly has focused on the threat of losing towns altogether, with Main Street programs as an essential economic development tool.

Main Street Iowa already had tallied a cumulative 11,000 net new jobs created, 3,800 net new businesses and nearly $1.2 billion in private investment in its downtown districts.

Rypkema’s study layered on subtler trends and analysis:

• $71.93 has been invested back into Main Street communities for every dollar it takes to run the program. (In recent years that ratio has soared as high as $130 for every dollar.)

• $43 million in sales tax from net new businesses has been collected annually.

• The increased assessed value of Main Street properties has provided the state $10.8 million over the life of the program “to pay cops and fix potholes.”

• Main Street communities have enjoyed net job growth in 25 out of 26 years. Iowa overall, meanwhile, suffered net job loss in seven years.

Rypkema, a South Dakota native, personally has visited about 30 of Iowa’s Main Street towns in his work over the decades.

He also scrutinized six Main Street Iowa districts in recent months for more detailed case studies in his new report: Bloomfield, Cedar Falls, Dubuque, Oskaloosa, Valley Junction (West Des Moines) and Woodbine.

To ensure that larger cities weren’t obscuring smaller towns in his statistics, Rypkema also separated them into two groups — more than or fewer than 5,000 residents — for comparison.

For communities over 5,000, the average sale price of buildings was $59,458 in the 1990s and shot up to $154,827 since 2000.

For towns under 5,000, the average sale price surged from $40,166 (1990s) to $130,764 (since 2000).

“This dying of rural Iowa: One of the signs is that you’re giving away buildings because nobody wants them,” he said. But that’s not happening.

Yet another case study has emerged on the Main Street strip in Charles City.

Both the city and Floyd County have shed residents in recent decades, but a new housing needs assessment of the area expects the local population to stabilize.

The development is named after the Thomsons’ maternal grandfather who was a town doctor in the early 20th century. The brothers’ father, meanwhile, once operated a Ben Franklin dime store on the very corner of Clark and Main where they’re building.

“It was painful to see the (1968) Charles City tornado take down so many of the buildings that we grew up with,” said Peter, who also runs an ad agency in Texas. “And now to have an opportunity to be part of that revitalization is amazing.”

The “tipping point” in the decision to build, Charley wrote in an email, “was the moment that I heard that (local tire manufacturer) Mitas decided to operate three shifts … at its Charles City plant.”

Charley “always thought that at some point the market would identify the Mason City-Waterloo corridor as the next big area for growth,” he added. “But when would that happen?

“The Mitas announcement answered that question: It’s happening now.”

Rural Iowa’s well-heeled expatriates who cherish their hometown memories have funded a variety of high-profile projects through the years and have been met with varying degrees of success to match.

But Rypkema’s analysis seems to indicate that on average success is the norm if you and your neighbors love your Main Street enough.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).